12 Secrets of Corn Maze Designers

Next time you find yourself hopelessly lost in a corn maze, take some time to appreciate the designer who got you there. Corn maze designing is a relatively new profession, with seasonal corn mazes as we know them only gaining traction in the past couple decades or so—but it’s already evolved into an art form. We spoke to designers with backgrounds in art, farming, and theater about what it takes to make a memorable maze.

1. A BACKGROUND IN ART—OR THEATER—CAN BE HELPFUL.

Jimmy Golub, who runs Our Farm just outside Syracuse, New York, with his wife Janine, won’t call himself an artist. But he can’t resist comparing what he's been doing in his cornfield each year since 1999 to composing a painting. “The field is my canvas, the planter is my paintbrush, and the seeds are my paint,” he tells Mental Floss.

Whether corn maze designers plant their corn in the shape of the maze like Jimmy does, or follow the standard practice of carving out their paths once the crop has had a chance grow a few inches high, the task benefits from an artistic eye. Megan Hurd-Dean is the creative one in her family, and she’s been in charge of designing the maze on Hurd Family Farm in New York's Hudson Valley—which is run by her parents—since high school. She helps with many aspects of the farm, but as she tells Mental Floss, “The corn maze has always been my baby.”

Amazing Maize Maze founder Don Frantz isn’t a farmer—he came into corn maze designing from a creative background. After musicals on Broadway and at Disneyland, he decided a corn maze would be his next project. He's since designed mazes around the world, from China to Pennsylvania. Head designer for MazePlay Chayce Whitworth also came into the business with a background in art, not agriculture. When he was an art student at college, a friend put him in touch with a farmer looking for drawings. “I didn’t even know what he was using them for,” he tells Mental Floss. “Then when I graduated from college he called me up and asked if I would like to go a little bit further and turn these drawings into corn maze designs [...] I have been a corn maze designer ever since.”

2. IT CAN GET TECHNICAL.

A knack for art isn’t the only thing required of corn maze designers. After sketching out their design on graph paper, the designers need to calculate how many rows of corn each block comes out to and then recreate the shape in the field—either with a tractor or by hand. In some cases the designers use GPS tools (like a GPS-guided mower) to ensure each element of the maze is in the correct place. Jimmy Golub gets creative with his regular maps app by taping a paper with his sketched-out design over his phone. "Then I walk around so the blue dot traces the outline," he says. This method is especially useful with more intricate designs, like Golub's maze in the shape of the United States.

3. THEY PLAN EARLY.

Most people don’t start thinking about corn mazes until autumn, but corn maze designers have to begin work much earlier. According to Frantz, he starts brainstorming ideas before Christmas. “The farmers will plow down the field in November and harvest it and they like to start talking about what’s the theme next year,” he says. Past maze designs he's produced through the Amazing Maize Maze have included the solar system, "the largest living sundial," and a re-creation of Washington Crossing the Delaware.

Actually cutting the maze isn’t the time-consuming part: It’s agreeing on a final design. “There is a lot of back and forth with the farmer on preliminary sketches and getting the correct field dimensions,” Whitworth says. “So really the design process can be several steps stretching over a few months to get it just right.”

4. THEY TRY TO ADD INTERACTIVE ELEMENTS.

Frantz approaches every maze he designs the same way he does a theme park show or musical. “What I love to have is a captive audience,” he says. “That means all I have to do is entertain them when they’re in there.” He turned the first maze he designed into a show by adding interactive elements along the path, like colored flags, boxes with messages, and tubes guests could use to talk to people in different parts of the maze. As they progressed, they would collect pieces that added up to make a map. “The theory is that every three minutes, the player will get something they can respond to,” Frantz says.

Frantz also knows from producing musicals that music is a great way to build atmosphere. “It was clear to me from the very beginning that I wanted the music to flow over the cornfield, and to me the best song you can ever play in a cornfield is the Jurassic Park theme.” The shape of his first maze was a dinosaur (specifically the "Cobosaurus," as in corn cob), so the song choice was appropriate.

Today, making corn mazes interactive for guests is the norm: It’s a way to keep guests engaged, whether they’re struggling with the maze or zipping through it. “I know families like to have a game,” Dean-Hurd says. “To have something else to do besides getting lost.”

5. THEY USE TRICKS TO THROW YOU OFF THE RIGHT PATH ...

If you want to make it through a corn maze without getting lost, keep an eye out for this trick some designers use to send people in the wrong direction. “Right when there’s a turn that it’s obvious that everyone’s going to make, you put something fun down the path opposite,” Frantz says. “So if there’s a mailbox or a speaking tube or something like that, you can coax people away from the right path, and that doesn’t feel like cheating to them because they get rewarded for it.”

6. … BUT THEY TRY NOT TO BE TOO MEAN.

Corn maze designers want their mazes to be challenging—but not so challenging that it cuts into a family’s pumpkin-picking time. Frantz says that one way to turn guests off a maze is to make them feel dumb. "You don’t want to make the player feel like a fool, like he was taken advantage of." One way a designer might do this is by making a dead end too long. "If you walk too far to realize it’s a dead end, that’s just mean," Frantz says.

At Golub's farm, where mazes cater to a lot of younger school kids, fairness is also important. “People who come to our place don’t want to spend two hours in a corn maze,” Golub says. “We want the [school field trips] that come here to go straight through. We don’t want them to make any wrong turns because we have time constraints.”

At the Hurd Family Farm, guests have the choice of the larger, more difficult maze or a simpler mini maze within the maze. “We have such a mixed bag of people who come to the farm,” Hurd-Dean said. “We wanted to make it easier for people.” And if for some reason guests still get lost, there are employees stationed around the maze they can call to for help.

7. THE CORN DOESN’T ALWAYS COOPERATE.

Few artists are forced to adapt to nature as much as corn maze designers. After months spent finalizing a design, they have to be prepared to make last-minute changes based on how the corn crop turned out that year. “One thing that I never thought of in art is how much weather would affect my designs,” Whitworth says. “If there is a drought some of the corn grows sporadically in areas and I have to adjust the design to still look good, but to dodge that area of bad corn.” In many cases he has to make these tweaks the same day the corn is ready to be chopped down. “It is a challenge to design something amazing and then in a couple of hours you have to destroy it and make is something different, and hopefully it is still amazing.”

8. SOME MAZES TAKE ALL DAY TO SOLVE.

The average maze might take 20 minutes to navigate, but some take much longer. Frantz says that it takes most people somewhere between 90 minutes and two hours to make it through of one his larger mazes. In a maze he designed in Ventura, California, it took one group six and a half hours to reach the end—an all-time record for a maze of his. “They had pizzas delivered,” he says.

9. BIGGER ISN’T ALWAYS BETTER.

Corn mazes weren’t much of a thing in the U.S. when Frantz first got involved in agrotourism in the early 1990s, and the first maze he designed broke the record for world’s largest at three acres. Today, a three-acre maze is considered small, with a typical maze averaging around five to eight acres. In a race to break new records, designers have become increasingly ambitious with their corn maze designs, peaking in 2014 with a 63-acre maze near Sacramento that spurred numerous 9-11 calls from people stuck inside. (No farm has attempted to beat the record since, perhaps out of respect for local police departments.)

On top of creating a safety hazard, Frantz says that trying to hit a certain acreage can lead to sloppy design. “You want guests to play the most maze while walking the least distance—to make it as compact as possible,” he says. To him, five acres is the perfect number: “I’ve found there’s no difference in the audience enjoyment between six acres and five acres. And that’s just another acre to take care of and maintain for the farmer.”

10. MAZES ARE A BRANDING OPPORTUNITY.

Even though guests can't see a maze's overall design from the ground, that doesn't mean it never gets seen. Farms like to feature photos of their mazes taken from above in postcards and promotional materials. Most corn maze designers base their mazes around an image that will look good in an aerial photo. This may be something recognizable to everyone—like a character from pop culture—but often it’s a message that’s specific to the farm. Frantz says, “It’s something that people want to say to the community, either in marketing, direct advertising, or community spirit.” And if the design contains the farm’s name, that means free advertising for them every time an image of the maze is shared.

11. COMPLICATED DESIGNS ARE THEIR UNDOING.

Farmers may ask designers to go all-out with their mazes, but a seasoned designer knows better than to agree to this. “The number one [challenge] is getting people to simplify their design idea,” Whitworth says. “Most people want as many objects and things in the design as possible.” Not only are intricate designs difficult to execute, they also don’t pop as much from the air as a simpler picture. “If you can’t recognize what the design is at first glance, you kind of have failed at the design.”

12. THEY'RE MINDFUL OF COPYRIGHTS.

Copyright law doesn’t make any specific mention of reproducing images in the form of corn mazes, but Golub doesn’t take any chances. The year he designed a maze in the shape of a Stratocaster guitar, he got in touch with Fender to ask permission. “They had to have meetings about it,” he recalled. Eventually he got the go-ahead to make the maze—as long as it included the registered trademark—but he doesn’t always hear from the copyright holders. In those cases he takes extra precautions. “When we did Bugs Bunny, we wrote Warner Bros. and we never heard back from them. We do a postcard every year and I wrote ‘a famous rabbit.’”

11 Secrets of Restaurant Servers

If you enjoy eating at restaurants, it's worth getting to know the waitstaff. Servers are the face of the establishments where they work, and often the last people to handle your food before it reaches your table.

"People think it’s an easy job, and it’s really not," Alexis, a server who’s worked in the business for 30 years, tells Mental Floss. She says, jokingly, "You want a professional handling your food, because we have your life in our hands."

Even if they don't spit on your plate (which thankfully they almost never will), a waiter can shape your dining experience. We spoke with some seasoned professionals about how they deal with rude customers, what they wish more customers would do, and other secrets of the job.

1. Server pay varies greatly.

The minimum wage changes from state to state, but for tipped workers like servers, the difference in pay can be even more drastic depending on where you work. In over a dozen states, if a worker typically makes a certain amount per month in tips (often $20-$30), their employers are only required to pay them a minimum of $2.13 an hour. That’s how much Jeff, a video producer who’s held various jobs in the restaurant industry, made when serving tables in New Jersey. “Usually, if I had a full paycheck of serving I could just put a little bit of gas into the tank,” he tells Mental Floss.

Waiters and waitresses in many states rely almost entirely on tips to make a living—but that’s not the case everywhere. California, Oregon, and Washington each pay tipped employees minimum hourly wages over $10. Jon, who currently works at a casual fine dining restaurant in Portland, Oregon, gets $12 an hour from his employer. Including tips, he typically earns $230 a day before taxes, and brings home about $34,000 a year on a 25-hour work week.

2. They split up tips among the restaurant staff.

Here’s another reason to be generous with your tips: Whatever extra money you leave on the table may be going to more than one person. If you ordered a drink from the bar, or if there was anyone other than your server bringing your food and clearing it from the table, that tip will likely be split up. At one restaurant job, Jeff says he paid food expeditors (workers who run food from the kitchen to tables) 10 percent of whatever tips he earned.

3. Waiters and waitresses know how to handle rude customers.

In addition to taking orders and serving food, servers are often forced to de-escalate conflicts. For many people waiting tables, this means acting sweet and professional no matter how angry customers get. Jon’s strategy is to “treat them like a child, smile, tell them everything they want to hear and remind yourself that it’ll be over soon.” Similarly, Mike (not his real name), a server at a farm-to-table restaurant in Texas, likes to “kill them with kindness." He tells Mental Floss he tries to “be the bigger man and [not] return sour attitudes back to people who don’t treat me with respect. If nothing else I can hold my head high knowing I did my job to the best of my ability and didn’t let their negativity affect my day with other, more pleasant patrons.”

Alexis, who currently waits tables at a family-owned restaurant in California, goes beyond faking a smile and makes a point to practice empathy when serving rude guests. “There’s a hospital near my restaurant, and people come there for comfort food with hospital visitor stickers on their clothes all the time. And I know then that they’re going through something traumatic usually. So when people are acting badly, I put imaginary hospital stickers on their clothes and try to remove my ego.”

4. Your waiter (probably) won’t spit in your food.

While most servers have had to deal with a customer who treats them poorly, they rarely retaliate. On the old urban legend of servers spitting in their customer’s food, Alexis says, “Never seen anybody mess with anybody’s food out of spite or malicious intent. I’ve never seen it happen and I’ve never actually done it. I don’t need to get back at people like that.”

5. Servers do more than wait tables.

Most customers just see one aspect of a server's jobs. When they’re not refilling your drinks and bringing you condiments, they're doing side work—either before the restaurant opens, after the last guest leaves, or in between waiting tables. “It could be rolling silverware, filling sauces, cutting lemons, rotating salad bars, stuff like that,” Jeff says. “It’s not just serving and you leave; there’s usually something else behind the scenes that the server has to do.”

Alexis says that in addition to hosting and serving, she has to prep to-go orders, bus tables, and wash dishes. "We’re expected to be working every moment,” she says.

6. Waiters have some wild stories.

Though parts of the job are tedious, servers are bound to see interesting things. Alexis recalls a husband and wife who were regulars at the restaurant where she worked in the 1990s; the man was later arrested for murder. “I found out when a newspaper reporter started asking me questions about them,” she says. “I’m quoted on the front page of the LA Times as saying ‘A waitress in a local coffee shop said they were a nightmare!’”

Other stories are lighter. “When I worked at Red Robin there was a lady that came in every morning and would ask to sit in the same booth," Jon says. "She carried a bag [of] stuffed animals (mostly dragons) and situated them around the booth, always in the same spots, she’d talk to them throughout her dining experience.”

7. Waiters hate it when you don't know what you want.

The simplest way to get on your server’s good side is to know exactly what you want when you tell them you're ready to order. That means not wasting their time stalling as you speed-read the menu. If you haven't decided on a dish, let your server know and trust that they'll return to your table in a few minutes. “Don’t tell your server you’re ready to order if you’re not ready to order,” Alexis says. “I’m like ‘Come on, I know you’re not ready. I’m going someplace else and I’ll be back.’”

It also means not asking your server to make several trips to your table in the span of a few minutes. Mike says that customers asking for items one at a time is one of his biggest pet peeves. “[Customers will say] ‘I need salt. I need hot sauce. I need another [...] drink.’ I was away from the table for 30 seconds each time. Those requests could easily be fulfilled in one trip to the kitchen.”

8. Waiters hate when you ask to move tables.

Next time you get seated in a restaurant, think twice before asking your server to switch tables. Restaurants divide their floor plan into sections, and each server is responsible for a different group of tables. The hosts in charge of seating rotate these sections to distribute guests evenly to servers; by asking to move, you may be depriving one server of an hour’s worth of tips while creating extra work for a server who’s already swamped. According Jon, the worst time to complain about where you were seated is when a restaurant is busy: “Sometimes this isn’t a problem if we’re slow, but if it’s a Friday/Saturday chances are you were put there for a reason.”

9. Servers work when everyone else gets the day off.

Servers have to be prepared to work a different schedule every week, work late into the night, and work on weekends. This can make maintaining a normal social life challenging. “My schedule can be troublesome, my girlfriend/friends have the opposite schedule as me so I’m never able to make it out on weekends or holidays,” Jon says.

And on the days many 9-to-5 workers go out to celebrate, servers have to wait on them. “Where I currently work I have worked Christmas Eve, Christmas, New Years Eve, New Years Day, and I will have to work on Mardi Gras (in the South),” Mike says. “I was leaving for work as my family arrived at my house for Christmas. I missed a New Years party in my house. If I hadn’t requested if off as soon as I began working there I’m almost certain I’d have to work 15 [hours] on my birthday.”

10. Your server might give you a free drink if you order it at the right time.

Asking your server for a free stuff likely won’t get you anywhere, but there is one thing you can do to possibly have a drink taken off your bill. If you wait until after your meal is served to order something cheap like a soft drink, Alexis says there’s a chance you won’t get charged for it all. “Not alcoholic drinks, but I’m talking about a cup of coffee or a soda or something like that, especially if you’re already paying for other beverages,” she says. “The server might get too busy or might not be inclined to go back to the POS [point of sale] system and add them on to your bill. It’s more trouble than it’s worth sometimes.”

11. Waiters want you to learn their names.

There’s a reason most servers introduce themselves before taking your order: They’d much rather you use their real names than a demeaning nickname. “Don’t call me sweetheart! I’m wearing a damn name tag,” Alexis says. “Sometimes I respond well, and other times no.”

And if your server doesn’t introduce themselves and isn’t wearing a name tag, Jon says it doesn’t hurt to ask. “Ask what the servers name is and refer them by name when you’re talking to them.” He says it’s “refreshing when a guest does this.”

11 Secrets of Perfumers

Perfumers are a rare breed. These half-artist, half-scientist hybrids undergo rigorous training, memorize the smells of hundreds of ingredients, and spend decades honing their craft—which might explain why there are reportedly more astronauts than perfumers in the world, according to the BBC.

For many, the job isn't merely about peddling bottles of sweet-smelling stuff to consumers; the goal is to convey an emotion, create a beautiful moment, or jog a childhood memory. To find out what it takes to create top-notch fragrances, Mental Floss spoke with three perfumers who broke into the industry through very different paths.

1. Perfumers can identify hundreds of ingredients by smell alone.

Mandy Aftel's perfume organ

By Joel Bernstein // Courtesy of Mandy Aftel

Master perfumers are sometimes called a nez—the French word for "nose"—for good reason. They commit hundreds of scents to memory and can distinguish between ingredients that would smell identical to the untrained nose. Many perfumers can also tell an essential oil from a synthetic material, which is no small feat. “You’re talking maybe 200 essential oils and about 1500 synthetic materials,” Jodi Wilson, a classically trained perfumer who now works as a fragrance sales manager for Orchidia Fragrances in Chicago, says of the ingredients perfumers typically employ.

The trick, she says, is to associate each smell with a distinct memory. “The more experiences you have in your life, the more memories you create, and that’s really how you remember these raw materials when you first start studying, because it reminds you of your grandmother or a flower shop or a bakery or a certain gum,” Wilson tells Mental Floss. (The link between smell and memory has actually been proven by science—one 2018 study by neurobiologists at the University of Toronto revealed that the brain not only stores information about certain scents, but also memories of when and where you first encountered them.)

2. Having a good sense of smell isn't enough to make a good perfumer.

Many perfumers have a heightened sense of smell. Jersey City-based perfumer Christopher Brosius, who founded the rebellious fragrance brand CB I Hate Perfume (a reference to his distaste for most commercial fragrances) is one of them. He realized just how strong his nose was while working briefly as a New York City cab driver—he had to roll the window down every time an “offensive” perfume wafted in his direction and made his stomach churn.

However, many aspiring perfumers mistakenly believe that a “good nose” will get them far. “That’s like saying that if you have 20/20 vision you’re the next Picasso,” Brosius tells Mental Floss. “A keen nose is very useful, but at the end of the day I have met perfumers who were extremely talented who didn’t smell anything more sharply than anybody else. They just had the capacity to think in a different way about what they were doing with scent and combining it in unique and interesting ways.” More important than a good sense of smell is creativity, a natural talent for recognizing scents that work well together, and the “dedication to building a very particular base of knowledge and skill,” Brosius says.

3. France's Givaudan Perfumery School is the goal for many would-be top perfumers.

Jodi Wilson picks roses for distillation while studying at the Roure Perfumery School (now called the Givaudan Perfumery School) in Grasse, France, during the 1991-92 academic year.

Courtesy of Jodi Wilson

Like many professional perfumers, Wilson was educated at what's now the Givaudan Perfumery School in France. Founded in 1946, it only accepts one or two promising students each year out of thousands of applicants—and sometimes none at all, if that year’s crop of candidates don’t live up to the school’s high standards. Former director Jean Guichard has said he hand-selected students based on their personality, talent, and motivations. “The perfumer should be a mixture between a scientist and a poet,” Guichard told the BBC. “When I meet people, I know if they have talent or not. I don’t want to have people who say, ‘I’m going to be a perfumer because they make a lot of money.’ That doesn’t interest me at all.” (And speaking of pay, Wilson says the starting salary for entry-level perfumers is about $45,000, but perfumers in New York City tend to start off a bit higher. It's not unheard of for the world's top perfumers to make six figures.)

The now-four-year Givaudan program is rigorous. First, students have to memorize about 1500 raw materials, Wilson says. Next, they learn how to build accords, which are the fragrance notes (like rose or jasmine) that form the heart of a perfume. They move on to perfume schemas (the “skeleton” of a fine fragrance, which contains 10 to 12 materials) and also learn about the culture and history of perfume. “It takes a long time to learn all of that, and that’s what you’re doing all day from 9 a.m. till 4 p.m. It’s intense,” Wilson says. If and when they graduate, they’ll have a job waiting for them at the Givaudan fragrance company, which is where they’ll learn how to make perfumes under the guidance of a seasoned professional.

4. perfume school isn’t the only way to break into the industry.

Perfumer Mandy Aftel at work

By Foster Curry // Courtesy of Mandy Aftel

Brosius says “99.9 percent” of aspiring perfumers would benefit from attending a perfume school. However, he personally did things a little differently and learned the fundamentals of perfume-making by landing a job at Kiehl’s and completing the company’s in-house training program.

It’s even less common for a perfumer to be self-taught, but it’s not impossible. The latter camp includes Mandy Aftel, a perfumer in Berkeley, California, who dropped a fulfilling career in psychotherapy to pursue a budding passion for perfume-making. For information about natural materials, she turned to fragrance books from the early 1900s, before synthetic materials started to saturate the market. Now, her Aftelier Perfumes business uses hundreds of natural ingredients—no synthetics—to create unique fragrances, and she has a loyal clientele. Regardless of the career paths they took, all of the perfumers agreed that this career is “a continuous learning process,” as Aftel tells Mental Floss. Both Brosius and Wilson said it takes 20 to 25 years to truly master the art of perfume-making, and Aftel still calls herself a “beginner” after 30 years of working in this field.

5. Not all perfumers work with fine fragrances.

Fragrance is used in many different ways, some of which we encounter on a daily basis without realizing it. Some perfumers specialize in creating scents for “industrial application,” which could include anything from children’s toys to paint to fabric, Brosius says. In the case of toilet-bowl cleaners, cat litter, and asphalt, the goal is not necessarily to create a pleasant aroma; instead, the challenge is to mask an unpleasant one. However, many of the perfumers working on the industrial side have scientific backgrounds and tend to work for a chemical company rather than a perfume label, Wilson says.

6. Some of the materials perfumers work with are hazardous.

Some undiluted ingredients—such as cinnamon—can cause severe chemical burns if they get on one's skin. Brosius wears gloves and goggles while blending materials and says some ingredients in his studio come with a "do not open without authorization" label attached. He says, “We have a protocol here that if anything new comes in, it’s opened in specific parts of the building or even sometimes outside on the terrace so that we don’t have an accident where it’s like, ‘Oops I just spilled one single drop of aldehyde [an organic compound] and now the entire building is uninhabitable, although next week it will smell like ginger ale!”

7. They want you to know your aromatherapy lotion might not be made of rose, jasmine, or whatever the bottle claims it contains.

Labels can be deceptive. If you’re buying an “aromatherapy” lotion or shower gel that claims to have rose, sandalwood, or jasmine in it but costs $15, that’s a red flag. According to Wilson, these ingredients can cost many thousands of dollars per pound. Wilson says it’s far more likely that cheaper products contain just a drop or two of the natural oils advertised—for the sake of being able to list them on the label—plus a host of synthetic ingredients that mimic the smell.

8. They're not always working on fragrances they like.

Marketing is a huge part of the cost of the perfume, especially on the higher end; the perfume industry spent around $800 million on marketing in 2016, according to Bloomberg. “Ninety percent of the time, the cost of the juice in that bottle is fractional,” Brosius says.

Marketing demands are also one reason why perfumers don't always get to follow their nose—and their creativity. “Most perfumers who work at large houses are not so happy with their job all the time,” Brosius says. “For every fine fragrance they get to work on, they’re compelled to work on a ton of crap fragrances as well. Much of it is entirely dependent on the whim of the marketing company.”

Companies are also more risk-averse, Wilson says—and the perfumes themselves now aren’t always built to last. “It used to be that a ‘classic’ was considered to last for 20 years—so your Chanel 5 and things of that nature,” Wilson says. “Now, it’s very rare to have a perfume that stays around for even 10 years.”

9. The smell of puppies is impossible to replicate—but perfumers are trying.

Brosius has taken on some ambitious projects over the years, including fragrances imitating the smells of snow and wet earth, but some scents are harder to capture than others. That’s because the aroma chemicals needed to replicate certain smells haven't been created yet. This can be said of gasoline, champagne and certain wines, and some animal smells. “Particularly with puppies and kittens, the molecules needed to accurately reproduce those smells don’t exist in the perfumer’s palette. You can’t solvent extract puppies and kittens for their smell," Brosius says, describing a method that involves applying a chemical solvent to a raw material—such as a flower—to extract its aroma.

However, he’s had success creating "a context that’s so strong that people are convinced that they’re smelling something that isn’t there," he says. For instance, his roast beef fragrance doesn’t contain roast beef or anything like it, but it does contain notes of parsley and black pepper. That scent in particular, and a few others like it, aren't meant to be worn on the body. Brosius says some of his fragrances are more like modern-day "smelling salts," where the goal is to revive you, in a sense, by relieving stress. "All you have to do is open the bottle, breathe in, and your system will automatically reset to calm," he says.

10. Perfumers sometimes work with whale poop.

Perfume-makers work with some unusual ingredients, and ambergris is certainly at the top of the list. This rock-like material comes from the excrement of sperm whales and occasionally washes up on shore. Aftel is fortunate enough to have some on display at the olfactory history museum she operates, called the Aftel Archive of Curious Scents. To convert the solid mass of crushed up squid and cuttlefish bits into an aromatic oil, she had to mash it up with a mortar and pestle, then add alcohol, heat it, and let it age. So what does it smell like in liquid form? “Heaven,” Aftel says. “It’s just ambery and shimmery. It’s a miracle of transformation.” Besides, Herman Melville mentioned it in Moby Dick and it used to be a 17th-century ice cream flavor, so you know it has to be good.

11. They keep wool nearby to combat nose fatigue.

Wool is the olfactory equivalent of eating sorbet in between courses. If you’re smelling the same scent for a prolonged period of time, or sniffing too many perfumes in a row, your odor receptors will habituate and stop sending those signals to your brain. This is officially called olfactory fatigue, and it explains why you might stop noticing a smell after a couple of minutes.

“If you smell a lot of scented materials, a lot of times your nose will just kind of conk out,” Aftel says. She keeps some wool nearby to help reset her sense of smell, and three big whiffs does the trick. So why does this work? Aftel says one theory is that the lanolin in wool absorbs and neutralizes odors, giving the brain a rest from sensory overload. As for those coffee beans you might see in some perfume shops? Those "definitely don't work," Aftel says.